USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Shelley Berc | A GIRL'S GUIDE TO THE DIVINE COMEDY

A GIRL'S GUIDE TO

THE DIVINE COMEDY

a
trilogy

by
Shelley Berc

published
in Plays for the End of the Century, Bonnie Marranca, Editor

PART
I:GHOST WRITING THE INFERNO

The characters:

Dante-- a girl who is a professional
ghostwriter

Virgil-- a worm/the mouth of reason

Beatrice--the body and soul of love, an
adolescent boy

Illuminated Manuscript--animate figures
that make up a book of illuminations

Hell Choir

Behind a scrim there is an image of a huge illuminated manuscript, very
medieval, only that the one big letter in it, D, is composed of human bodies, the Figures of the Illuminated
Manuscript.

A girl wearing Dante's classic hood comes out on stage. She is holding a
Japanese calligraphy brush that is so large it could be mistaken for a broom.
Center, there isa large board ,
sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes transparenton which the girl Dante can write thoughts
and map out her journey. Behind her, above the 'human illumination' is a ticker
tape-like marquee and it starts to print out:

Midway through my life's journey

I found myself in a dark wood

For the
straight way was lost to me.

A huge burst of raucous laughter from
the girl.

A few bars of Gregorian chant from the
Hell Choir.

The people making up the letter D come apart.

A subway map in which the various stops
have the names of the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno has replaced the scrim
illumination image. The specific circles light up when the girl Dante enters
them on her journey through hell. For right now, the map simply glows a
ghoulish green. The girl Dante comes forward with her calligraphy brush. It
looks like she's sweeping the floor with it but she's really writing the text
we see come up on the marquee.

DANTE

My name is Dante.I'm a ghost writer and I'm here to write
the

Stories of the dead,
in their own words, the vulgar tongue.

(DANTE
sticks out her tongue at the audience. She takes a mirror out of her pocket, she blows on it, and she glares
in it.)

No sight of myself. No breath. I'm a
ghostwriter in the world of the dead. I write in disappearing ink. Its hell.

(She laughs
and scribbles maniacally all over the board)

HELL CHOIR(SINGING)

love
brought me here

love
left me here

love
put these words in my mouth

these
dead stars in my eyes.

DANTE

I remember a girl I knew once....

She was beautiful, young

She wore a crimson dress...

She never noticedme

I loved her

She's dead.

BEATRICE (VOICE OVER, HER PHYSICAL PRESENCE INDICATED BY LIGHT)

*The day was now departing. The dark
air released the beings of earth from their labors and I alone stood awake and
made ready for the journey. O memory that suffered it all in, help me set down
what it is that I heard and saw.

DANTE(AS IF BY ROTE)

*Midway through my life's journey

I found myself in a dark wood

for the straight way was lost to me.

I cannot really say how I entered the
wood,

I was very tired when I gave up
thepath.

But when I reached the bottom of the
hill, there

at the end of the valley that had
caused me so much fear,

I looked up and saw the sun.

(DANTE uncloaks her face)

(THE
IMAGE OF BEATRICE, AN ADOLESCENT BOY APPEARS UPSTAGE)

BEATRICE

Beatrice:whom she loved all her life, who never knew she existed, who died not
caring she existed. Leaving Dante to a long, miserable, and lonely life. An
exile from life.

DANTE

invisible

see-through

transparent to the one I love,

thrown out of my country,

exiled in absentia, on pain of death.

Never to go home again,

neverto live anywhere again. Not even as a memory.

BEATRICE(who has been painting his nails)

She was an exile of her country and an exile
of love. These two elements together made her a naturalchronicler of hell.

Beatrice's nails cut slashes in the
scrim that define abstracted letters in the Illuminated Manuscript. These
letters bleed like a whipped back until they obliterate themselves. The Figures
of the Illuminated Manuscript adjust the lights on the map until it looks like
a stargazer's chart of the constellations.

DANTE

Grief is a map you can chart your heart
and soul on. Here is where she never looked at me, here is where she kissed
another, here is where she died without my name on her lips--Beatrice.

The Figures form the letter I on the illuminated manuscript. Ticker tape neon reads off: I for innocence, ignorance,
insensitive, insatiable, inspirational, insipid, insidious, infernal. The
translucent manuscript opens up like a book to reveal another place-- the red
and black brush strokes, dots, lines and shadows of a prehistoric cave
painting.

THE GIRL DANTE STARTS
TO JOURNEY. SHE IS EQUIPT WITH

CAMERA AND
BINOCULARS.

DANTE (VOICE OVER)

I was continuing my journey up the
barren slope, when suddenly a leopard appeared before me. He stopped in his
tracks and blocked my way. Many times I thought to turn back. But it was
sunrise--the hour of the day for hope....

The Illuminated manuscript creatures form the letter V. The ticker tape neon reads off
against an elaborate back lit illumination--V for vast, vain, Vancouver,
vortex, vacuous, voracious.

.

DANTE

*Then a mountain lion appeared before
me, raging with hunger.

And all my hope was lost in fear. *

The Figures of the illuminated manuscript make the letter I.

VOICE OVER AS BRUSH STROKES THE
LETTER Ion the floor. The I also APPEARS ONCE MORE ON THE NEON TICKER TAPE.

*Then came a she-wolf . She seemed to
carry every hunger known to man in her starvedcarcass. She pushed me back, to where the sun is silent. *

IMAGE
OF BEATRICE APPEARS UPSTAGE

BEATRICE

My friend who is not the friend of fortune
has been turned back by fear.

MEMBER OF HELL CHORUS

But love sent reason to teach the girl,
dante, how she might live without love, that is--how she might survive among
the dead.

BEATRICE

And Beatrice sent her Virgil the worm,
the voice of reason to eat her holy heart out. To take her down, among the
hidden things.

A GIANT WORM SLOWLY COURSES THE STAGE. HE TAKES DANTE BY HER
HAND. THEY WALK. THE MAP OF HELL GLITTERS LIKE A STARRY NIGHT.

VIRGIL

If you want to get past the beasts that
prey, you'll have to go another way. Follow me. Let me be your eyes in the
dirt; let me eat a hole in your heart that will become your sight and with it
you will see hell, purgatory and paradise.

BEATRICE

So the girl dante, bereft of home and
vacant of love followed the giant worm, the voice of reason, into a hole in the
ground. They descended into the blind world--

THE GIANT WORM LEADS THE GIRL
ACROSS THE STAGE. THE subway STOP CIRCLES OF HELL ALL LIGHT UP AS the song of
exile is sung.

SONG
OF HOMELESSNESS

No home

No
country

No
love

No
property

No
phone calls

No
friends

No
future

No
end

VIRGIL

The girl dante is walking through the
valley of death with her heaven sent guide, Virgil the worm, the voice of
reason whose mission it is on pain of love to eat her heart out and while she's
walking here and now, she's also sitting, hunched over ' back then'-a wandering
scribe, a middle aged monk in the middle ages illuminating a divine comedy by
brush and hand. Now he is scripting the letter E,E for exile.

DANTE

Sure... obviously.Why would she even be on this trip if she had
a country, a home, a love, a purpose? Why would she do this if she had anywhere
else to go?Her home isthis elaborated letter-- E--for
exile. She sleeps in its shade, raids its garbage bins at night. She eats her
pride and she knows she's supposed to feel better.

BEATRICE

So the girl dante tries not to think of
home. The thought of home makes her sick--home/sick.

DANTE

But sometimes home thinks of me

It asks me:

Where have I been?

Why don't I write or call?

Where am I going?

And for how long?

The Figures of the Illuminated Manuscript form the letter E. The neon lights up with the word
'exile' that then bleeds into the letters spelling out the D-I-V-I-N-E COMEDY.
The letters now look as if they are attached in space like a map of the heavens
joining one star to the next to create the outlines of mythological sky
figures--the lion, the leopard, the wolf, the whale, the serpent of the seas.

VIRGIL

*You shall leave everything you love
most dearly behind. This is the arrow thatexile shoots first. You shall come to depend on the salt in another's
bread.

This shall become the way of your
sustenance. But what will weigh you down most will be the senseless company you
must keep on your journey.

DANTE

E can only mean one thing--Exile. To be
cut off from country or home by free choice or force. To be absent from country
or home by free choice or force. To be separated from the realm of human
intercourse, to be made alien from love, honor, contact of the most tenuous
sort with the familiar, the known, the trusted, the believed or the beloved. To
be unable to return to country or home or love or to ever know again what
country or home or love can mean. And so, in this moment, there is stasis or
there is journey. Either way, at this juncture, there is unmitigated pain.

BEATRICE

The wandering monk scribe of middle
ages points to the illuminated circles, where a gold leafed version of herself
lives in passionless vellum. The girl dante points to herself the scribe who is
in fact the very home that is sick of her and she cries. Her tears bleed over
the elaborated pages and they come alive.

VIRGIL

"Let me tell you about the circles
of hell" says the scribe who is wandering in the painted words to the girl
dante who is wandering in no-where. A circle is perfect-- a space with no way
in and no way out. You just go round and round and round.

HELL
CHOIR(AS AROUND)

A
circle is

a
globe

a hole

a
bubble

a
fist

A
circle is

a globe

a hole

a
bubble

a
fist

DANTE

The girl dante, who is drifting nowhere
because she is in exile and thinks she is dead, wants to go back to the middle
ages, because she is sure that she is this wandering scribe, this middle aged
monk- man in a world of miracles, in which the miraculous was more real than
truth, in which a series of visual allegories leaded in stained glass or
pressed into a book of illuminations or painted in frescoes on ecclesiastical
walls were the true reality.She was
headed back there, returning from mission when she got lost and became a road
kill on the map of earthly love.

BEATRICE

A casualty of bad directions.

VIRGIL

When suddenly...the leopard, the lion, the she-wolf...

An illumination of a medieval bestiary appears on the scrim,
including many of the animals, real and imaginary, from the Divine Comedy.
Though clearly medieval, the images are a bit reminiscent of Las Vegas slot
machine symbols. The Figures of the Illumination do a series of iconic hand
gestures that are a cross between medieval gestes--the gesture for truth, for
forgiveness, for prayer, for charity-- and modern day rap poses.

DANTE

The girl dante steps into the middle ages, an
immobile scribe in the grips of illumination. "It's like water," she
marvels, "the way you test it first, step by step, until the only thing
left is to freeze or jump in."

BEATRICE

As she enters the illumination of the
scribe she is, she sees the circles of hell he is painting are named, just like
the destinations on her subway map--the circle of gluttony, the ring of
treachery, the terrace of cowardlyfear.
These circles catalogue every bad doing, every horrid thought, every evil
coincidence known to man. The girl dante is sure that somewhere among the
specificity of these names and their doings, this is where she will find love.
Where she will no longer be in exile.She's sucked into image after image, circle after circle. She can't find
his way out of these circles. She pulls free of one, only to be dragged into
another one.

DANTE

Wait a minute. Time to get our
bearings. The way I see it, I’m still in a dark wood. My guide Virgil the worm,
the voice of reason is beside me. We're reading our map to hell

(dante
takes out her flashlight. Virgil becomes a sock puppet on dante's hand while at
times he also appears upstage as the giant worm. The lights go up on the neon
subway stop map. Dante turns to read it.)

so we can figure out which way to
go....Now, if the main objective in visiting hell is to get out of it and
thereby escape the exile that brought you to it, this means taking the road
that leads to home which is, as everyone knows, where the heart is, which is
being being eaten away so that one can survive the journey through. Where then,
if the heart disappears, does the traveller end up?

SONG
OF THE TOURIST attractions of the CIRCLES
OF HELL

limbo

the
faithless but virtuous

lust

gluttony

misers and wasters

the
angry and the sullen

the
violent against others

the
violent against themselves

the
violent against God and Nature

usury

fraud

malice

panderers

seducers

flatterers

grafters

thieves

sowers
of discord

evil
impersonators

counterfeiters

false
witnesses

traitors

VIRGIL

It could take a lifetime to see it all!

DANTE(WEEPING, PARALYZED)

I remember a girl I knewonce....

She was beautiful, young

She wore a crimson dress...

I loved her. She's dead.

VIRGIL(PUSHING DANTE)

Let's get going.

BEATRICE

You can't stay in limbo forever.

VIRGIL

Time to sink or swim.

THE CROSSING OF THE RIVER ACHERON TO
HELL'S GATE is announced on the scrim.

The Figures of the illuminated manuscript sweep across the
stage with sextants lifted up in their arms like oars, paddling the sky. The
sound of black, bottomless water. Emphysymic breathing. The red eyed glower
ofthe boatman Charon draws the Figures
aboard.

DANTE

I did not speak again until we came to
the river. There an old man was shouting at us "Welcome home, damned
souls. Forget your hope of ever seeing heaven--I come to take you to
hell."And so we followed the
thousands of souls traveling over the dark waters. Even before we had reached
the other shore, new hoards stood ready on the bank to make the regrettable
journey in which their own obsessions urge them on, turning their fear turn
into desire--the desire to go to hell.

SONG
OF THE GATE OF HELL

*Through
me is the way to the city of suffering

Through
me is the way to eternal pain

Through
me is the way to the lost people

Abandon
all hope ye who enter here.

DANTE

Here sighs and screams, cries and
lamentations resonated against the starless sky.

VIRGIL

Here you must leave behind all fear,
all hesitation, or else the pilgrim will not survive.

HELL CHOIR

*A wind cracked through the
tear-drenched earth

a wind that rose with a blood red light

a light that overwhelmed all my senses

and I fell like a man struck dead.

LIGHTS UP ON THE SUBWAY STOP:

THE CIRCLE OF LUST

Two figures sit watching tv--its obvious that it is a soap
opera. The text is in Italian without any subtitles, but we understand the
situation all too well. We hear the sounds of deep kisses, ala movie close ups;
the magnified filmic sighs of lovers. It is unclear if the sounds are coming
from the television or the two people watching it.

The scrim reveals a
list of famous obsessed couples of history:

paris and
helen

antony and cleopatra

tristan and
isolde

lancelot
and guinevere

paolo and
francesca.

This entire segment is underscored by relentless winds.
Around the two characters entwined in front of the television, two Figures move
in a circle of unstoppable frenzy, trying to touch, trying not to touch, trying
to escape,chasing and never catching each other, over and over in the long
wind.

THE SONG OF PAOLO AND FRANCESCA

why
are we in hell for loving

what
kind of loving is hell

how
can loving be hell

why
doesn't the wind stop

why
when I touch you am I not touching you

where
is the earth gone

where
has comfort gone

why
won't the wind stop?

BEATRICE(LAUGHING)

*Love that can suddenly seize the
tender heart

Love that releases no loved one from
loving

Love that led the two of them to one
death.

Love, the hurricane of Hell.

Virgil as a weather man prophesying on
a chart that isa pictorial diagram of
the human heart mapped out like a weather map, with wind currents, cold fronts,
clouds, radar predictions.

VIRGIL

*This hurricane of hell never stops

The wind whips them here, whips them
there.

There's no hope of rest nor respite
from suffering.

BEATRICE

Ah! How many sweet hopes led them to this end .

DANTE

The girl dante has problems with this
story of hell she's driven to ghost write. She thinks obsessive love is the
quintessential love, an umbilical of love from which she is cut off. She thinks
of the dead Beatrice whom she never even kissed,the girl at the altar in the crimson dress,
with the cold lips, who never raised her eyes in greeting, who never said
"Hello, how are you, today?" And dante feels, she feels jealous of Paolo
and Francesca, those two souls lost in the perpetual hunger of their love.

I love these lovers. I love that they'd
rather be in hell together than apart. I love that they don't even know their
own volition, their own siamese twin hearts.

I love how they think something is
making them suffer other than themselves-

something that is out of their control.
I love the way they fly around in circles--I love all the wretched circles,
these circles of hell that we go down inch by inch like a wishing well.

VIRGIL

Watch yourself in the middle ages, a
phantom of some other self at his stool, hunched over his parchment and ink.
Hermit. Recluse. Where are you, lost in your labors, in your magnificent
concentration? Are you ghost writing or are you lying?Illuminating the letters--G for gluttony, F
for fraud, P for pride. You are sure your beautiful elaboration of words shall
give them more weight, more meaning, that is: more reason for being, that is:
more credibility in place of honesty.

DANTE

The letters are so intricate--so full
of demons and snakes that the written script is only legible to the initiate. For
example--are the letters letters or some form of new number--algebraic,
perhaps.Or are the letters pictures of
the events of history--the laborer and the lady, the lord andthe manor, the monk in the scriptorium?Or are the letters he is making circles, the
concentric globes of hell, funneling down to the depths of obsession. Look!
Hidden in the tapestry of script, the gold leaf, the flowers, rabbits, sweet
monkeys, the figures of the naked--a man and a woman.What is it--picture or letter, abstraction or
story?

BEATRICE

dante the girl is weeping. From Virgil
the worm the mouth of reason who is eating her heart out with reason so called.
Objectivity is an algebraic thing--symbols of abstraction when unapplied to the
living reality. But she wants...the heart wants....

VIRGIL

Listen to me, dante girl. Follow how I
see. Then you'll stop crying.

VIRGIL AND DANTE JOURNEY

VIRGIL

And so the girl dante spits on them,
Paolo and Francesca and when she spits them out, it will be as the ghost story
of their own self loathing which never did exist except in her own ghost
writer's envy.

DANTE

But I can't stop crying. Why am I
crying when I want to be spitting?

BEATRICE

Remember a girl you knew once....

She wore a crimson dress..

DANTE

We only met 3 times

Nine years apart

3 times 3

3 squared

x to the power of z

I loved her

BEATRICE

She's dead.

DANTE

She never noticed me.

She's dead.

Oh lucky Paolo and Francesca.

VIRGIL(DRAGGING DANTE)

From lust we descend to gluttony. It’s
a natural progression from the place where you can never get enough to the
circle where you're stuffed.

The Hell Choir is dining on human hearts, tossing them up in
the air like flapjacks. The Figures of the Illumination make up Cerberus, the
dog with three heads. The choir sings behind the dog figure. A gigantic puppet
representation of Cerberus lumbers on stage. The sound of hard rain is heard.

Rain. Suffering has confused me. I see
new torments wherever I set my eyes. I am in the third circle filled with cold
filthy rain. The earth, as it receives this downpour stinks.

VIRGIL

Over the souls of the drowning--the
Dog, Cerberus reigns.

His three throats growling, his three
maws foaming.

His eyes red as blood, his enormous
belly bulging

as he tears them up, one by one.

BEATRICE

The girl dante knows it is a sin to
eat. That the holier the girl the more starving. This will help her write the
cautionary tale of the gluttonous, in the glory of her famished anonymity,
through the pores of her see-through body, the horror story of the hungry
heart.

dante is semi-devoured by the beast with the three throats
and obscured by the hands that are stuffing these throats. Cerberus is
singing...

more
more more more more more more.

.

DANTE

Sometimes I know I do not exist. That I
am a ghost and that these dead souls are the living. That's why everyone thinks
I'm some Italian guy from the middle ages. I have made myself into an Italian
guy from the middle ages and I have made everybody believe it so I won't exist
because if I do exist with my loud mouth that is not the mouth of the worm
virgil, the voice of reason, it is clear that one of those guys will kill me
which I do not want because I know how you can be tortured to death by the
dead.I'd rather be dead to begin with.

VIRGIL

Oh, be reasonable (the hand puppet starts hitting Dante over the head)

A fight ensues between Cerberus and Virgil who rescues Dante
by sucking him out of the monster's mouth with a vacuum.

VIRGIL

Escape is something I'd stake my life
on. Escape from every temporary home, each passing love, all promises. Escape
is the challenge of the consumer in the infernal shopping mall. To emerge a
hero is to return home empty handed. It's true--no matter what they say or what
the sales, do not buy any of it.

LIGHTS UP ON SUBWAY STOP:

THE
AVARICIOUS AND THE WASTEFUL.

DANTE

My name is dante. I'm telling you this
again because while I know that my words are disappearing ink, I think maybe my
voice is disappearing, too. That you will forget who I am or never know who I
am or think I'm really someone other than I am while I keep fading away. The
wasteful and the avaricious, tied together forever here,have hired me to ghost write their stories. But they criticize my
style, my ideas; they tell me I am writing in a dead language that no one ever
reads. Well, what the hell do they expect?

BEATRICE(LAUGHING)

Who has gathered together so many
strange tortures as I have seen?

Justice of God.

Why do we let our guilt consume us so?

DANTE

*Crowds pressed on every side of me,

With their chests they push the giant
grinding wheels

Over and over, they slam against each
other, screaming

" Why do you waste? Why do you
save?"

For all eternity they'll come to blows

those with their fists clenched tight,

those squandering their silver and
gold....

excess has robbed them both of this
sweet world.

VIRGIL(THE HAND PUPPET)

What shall we do today? Shall we go to
Bergdorfs, shall we go to Bloomingdales? I know you don't like Saks. Don't
waste your dime on that beggar in the street--if you put your money in his hand
you'll get a life threatening disease.He should know it's better to give than to receive.

BEATRICE

This an update on the states of sin
which seem to be growing:

the
sin of poverty

the
sin of homelessness

the
sin of extreme need

CHOIR AND BEATRICE IN A HALLELUJAH CHORUS

the
sin of needing help

the
sin of asking for it

the
sin of liberalism

the
sin of helplessness

the
sin of not having it all

the
sin of wanting too little

the
sin of being too old

the
sin of not being tough enough

the
sin of idealism

the
sin of loving too much.

VIRGIL

We think about love a lot, here in
hell--love of the body, love of the mind, love of money love of poverty love of
greed love of love. We think about these things all the time. love love love

DANTE

We watch the creatures suffer in their
love, too much, too little, wrong headed, dizzy, perverse. we would sympathize
with them if we had any heart left with which to feel--

VIRGIL

But we do not.We have ascended to tough love.

DANTE

I knew a girl once, I loved her, she
barely noticed me. I'm glad she's dead. How horrible it is not to exist for the
one you live for.

The City of Dis appears on the scrim.
It is a combination of illuminated letters, urban abstractions, and negatives
of photographs of cities. It looks both elaborate and bombed out--ultra modern
and medieval.

BEATRICE (VOICE OVER)

So it was that they arrived inside the
deep cut trenches that are the moats of this despondent land.

DANTE

I found myself upon the verge of an
abyss, a melancholy valley of unending tears.

BEATRICE

Round about now the girl dante and the worm of reason virgil are sick to
hell of hell. Every sinner wants to confess his or her story like its for the
cover of People magazine. The circles of wrath, vengeance, usury,
treachery--all their inhabitants have one thing in common--they want to tell
all.

DANTE

Ugolino, a father who ate his own children,
insists we put in all the grisly details of the act."I'm a new man after this
experience" he declares. "I used to care only about my career. Now
I'm a devoted family man. It will vindicate me, he says, if you write it right.

BEATRICE

No one in hell is as much in hell as
this girl who’s supposed to tell everybody else's story while she, herself, is
doomed to invisibility. No one in hell is as much in hell as the girl dante
whose heart is scheduled to disappear, bit by bit as the worm of reason feeds.

DANTE

There are times she just can't take it
anymore-- the foreordained anonymity of the ghost writing life--there are times
when she loses the will to transcribe--to speak the questions, to record the
answers of the damned. At such times her mouth is wide open but not a sound
comes out--and in her breath as it hits the infernal frozen air--she sees her
scribe in his illumination, hunched over, all alone writing:

After
awhile, in the universal equation of time and relativity, they're all the `same thing."

BEATRICE

Circle after circle --we're all creatures of
habit and the habits of the circles of hell make the girl dante feel at home.
So she adapts to every evil they hold. None of it looks so bad, foreign or
boring anymore. The scribe is drawing the flames of fury from out the mouths of
the wrathful and meticulously furrowing the brows of the sullen. The girl is so
absorbed in the drawing that she can't see she's stuck in the mud that is the
sin of anger, or that the city of Dis is impenetrable, that she can't even get
across the river Styx.

VIRGIL

Learn to crawl, dante girl. Learn to
crawl. On your belly and knees and tongue learn to wriggle through hell's
walls.

BEATRICE

And so the girl dante learned to swim
through the mud and crawl through the rocks of hell. Sometimes she would stop
to build herself a model of revelation.

The Figures of the Illuminated Manuscript carry on a pyramid
of miniature architectural blocks.The
girl dante takes the blocks from them and puts them on a table made of their
backs. With these blocks, she will construct the city of Dis, while an ominous
blow up shadow of it appears on scrim.

DANTE

On every side, the steep and filthy
hole trembled so that I thought the universe felt love which some say is the
cause of all chaos.

VIRGIL (pointing to the subway map of hell on the scrim)

Here we have treachery --look how
crooked, just like a medieval street.Here's the public works of grand theft and the cafes of petty larceny,
the neighborhoods of fraud simple and fraud compound, the public squares of
greed, the bus stops of lust. And here, the great waterway of civilized
life--the boiling river of blood where every person who has done violence to
another is drinking...and burning up.

SUBWAY STOP:

THE
CIRCLE OF VIOLENCE:

SONG OF THE SINNERS OF VIOLENCE

VIOLENCE TO ONES NEIGHBOR: TYRANTS AND MURDERERS.

VIOLENCE TO ONES SELF:
SUICIDES AND SELF MUTILA-TORS.

VIOLENCE TO DIVINE
SPIRIT AND NATURE. TRAITORS
TO THE SPIRIT OF LIFE.

ILLUMINATION: Violence to Ones Neighbor

BEATRICE

*Thousands of Centaurs guard these
sinners, with human faces and horses' hooves. Their arrows take down any soul
that raises his head above the blood any more than his guilt deserves.

(The Figures as centaurs, in their hands are
measuring compasses that serve as
spears)

The violence of the conqueror is
greatest when he assures that not only the bodies of the conquered are dead but
all historic memory of them is erased. So completely erased, that even the most
experienced ghost writer cannot dig it up.

TAPED VOICES (SHARP, DEMANDING, UNCTUOUS)

WHAT'S THAT YOU SAID. I DIDN'T HEAR
YOU. I DON'T GET IT. PROVE IT. YOU'VE GOT TO PROVE IT TO ME TO ME OR WHY SHOULD
I BUY IT. SPEAK UP. DON'T BE COY. IF YOU DON'T PROVE IT, YOU ARE NOTHING. IT
NEVER HAPPENED. IT DOESN'T EXIST. ANYHOW, YOUR VOICE--ITS TOO SOFT. YOU DON'T
EVEN EXIST.

DANTE

The girl dante, the ghost writer, is in
hell because she is an (unwilling) exile from the love of man-kind. The girl
dante, the ghost, is in hell, because she is unable to operate in the community
of man-kind. She even has grave sinner thoughts that such a thing as man-kind
doesn't exist. The worm virgil the mouth of hell-reason says she must prove
herself now: "Prove yourself," says he "if you prove yourself to
me you'll be a hero." But nothing she proves is ever enough. Everything
she ghost writes falls through the cracks-- the fissures of hell that swallow all
true things and say they aren't loud enough, aren't logical enough, aren't
important enough, aren't enough enough. The girl dante believes in hell, that
she'll never believe in herself again. What for, if she can't prove it?

VIRGIL

The girl dante, the ghost writer, tries
to find her proof in the figure of the scribe in the circle of wrath he has
brought her to. She shakes the moats and ditches of hell looking for him who
brought her here, who has disappeared. She's alone in the seventh circle. There
are no more alphabetical bestiaries, no more allegorical demons in her way,
only a mutilated forest to trip her up-- an arboretum of suicides.

Subway
Stop:

Violence to Ones Self: the forest of suicides

the illuminated dance of the suicide trees

SONG OF THE SUICIDES

*no
green leaves in the forest, only black…

no
trees straight and smooth, only knotted and gnarled…

no
fruits here, just briers bearing poison.

BEATRICE

The girl dante thinks she can die for
love. She's dead already, poor thing. Her worm eaten heart, her cynical turn of
mind. She's choked herself on bitterness and despair, on the words 'if only',
the phrase 'what might have been' in what's left of her grieving heart.

STATEMENT OF THE SUICIDES

Once we were human beings and now we
are bloody stumps searching for the flesh we gave up. So we drag our bodies
here to hang in this sad wood, each on the stump of its vindictive shadow.

DANTE (CARVING PICTURES IN to HER
SKIN)

The girl dante the ghost writer is dead
in hell, double dead again. She feels redundant. She wants to walk through her
afterlife, a horseman without her head. The girl dante has killed herself many
many times but somehow still she isn't dead. But she's a ghost anyhow, which is
why she wants to be as dead as she feels. This is how she gives up writing, all
manner of writing, even ghost writing. She walks in the footsteps of the
medieval scribe she sees illuminating in her mind. But he doesn't provide any
relief. All he can draw is the ins and outs of a calligraphraphic hell, a maze
of doctrine and reasoning.

VIRGIL

The scribe walks up and down the
scriptorium of the dead. This pacing is like tracing words on paper, he thinks.
Endless as air his shuffle, carving out the illuminations from the dust, like
after thoughts. Thought he believes is the true exile as it wanders from place
to place, thrown out of one brain only to roost in another.

He walks between the burning scrolls
that make up the letters, the language of hell: love, charity, honesty,
humility, forgiveness. This is the language of hell.Because. The scribe squeezes himself through
the bright fire and the black night, the true eye of the needle. It is in that
emaciated corridor that the scribe alone can read the Book of Life in Hell.

SUBWAY STOP:

THE VIOLENT AGAINST GOD

FIGURES OF THE ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT: the dance of the
wretched hands, who can't stop beating their fists against the nothingness upon
which the image the deity.

SINGERS OF HELL

The
dance of wretched hands is never done

the
cha cha cha of destruction in the name of God, the Almighty.

The
violent dance against the dream of cosmos.

The dance of the hands turns into a dance of equations
elaborating the relative gravity of various evils, using algebraic symbols of
greater and less than and equals. The ticker tape subway screen lights up with
names of man made and natural disasters and their graphic equivalencies on the
sin scale. These include: THE BURYING OF POMPEII AND HERACULEUM
BY THE ERUPTION OF MT.VESUVIUS. THE DROPPING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB ON HIROSHIMA.
THE GREAT LONDON FIRE. WORLD WARS I AND II, THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE,
TIANNEMAN SQUARE, AIDS, BOSNIA, FLOOD, FAMINE, PLAGUE, POLITICAL TORTURE.

DANTE(READING)

Dear God:

I know from my readings of the Good
Book that a state of grace is one in which there is no spiritual deficit--

How do we know when we are in this
grace state?

Do you know it because you feel at
peace?

How do you know you're not just
sleeping?

Do you know it because your own deeds
have made you feel good about yourself?

How do you know you're not just self
righteous?

Do you know it because you feel no
guilt, no remorse?

Maybe you're just amoral.

How do you know you're doing the right
thing

when nature no longer controls
anything?

How do we know what is just

when there are so many possibilities?

How do we know what is wrong

if the context is always changing?

How do we know famine is wrong

if there are too many people, too
little planet?

How do we know that a forest fire is
bad

if that's the way a wilderness
regenerates itself?

How do we know the line over which we
cannot step

and still live with ourselves?

And how do we judge love if it is, as
you suggest, the principle of life

when that principle causes such great
devastation?

How do we judge it, put it on trial
when you say it is the absolute numeral--

the point from which we must begin all
our mathematical gymnastics.

I put the concepts here:

love

liberty

communication

good deeds

good thoughts

good intentions

love

and I put the numbers here--

100,000 dead offlood and quake in one year

10 million infected with deadly disease in a
decade

50 million dead of starvation

70 million dead in wars

how do we judge

when I can't balance your books of
atrocity?

SCREEN INTERLUDE OR: WHY IS DANTE AGIRL A

AND NOT A GUY?

BEATRICE

dante is a girl because she is in love
with someone who does not know who she is.

dante is a girl because outside her
beloved she is not supposed to exist.

dante is a girl because having no
culture of her own she is a thief.

dante is a girl because she believes
she is invisible.

dante is a girl because she believes if
she's not invisible then she better be.

(BEATRICE VANISHES)

DANTE

Everywhere she goes she believes she'd
better disappear. She should hide herself and send out her letters of the dead
and people reading them will say, "it's so real it’s as if they were
alive!" And the girl dante, though proud of her ghost writing skill wants
to hang herself in a big way.Because,
she reasons, with the help of the worm mouth of reason--if my fate in life is
not to exist except through the actions of others, then in fact, I don't really
exist as an entity unto myself at allwhich wouldn't be a problem except for living in this age of
individualismwhich everybody knows, in
their heart of hearts, is too brutal selfish and immoral to everpush civilization forward. But who can help
the times they're born into or the sex? So it is left to the girl dante to
retire, to lie back on the musty shelf of get lost and write her divine comedy
in the white blood of a ghost. But she can't avoid committing the sin of envy.
She's so full of envy for the souls of suicide who can at least turn against
themselves.

VIRGIL(THE HAND PUPPET)

And virgil makesthe girl dante take off the cord she keeps
around her waist like a noose just in case she decides to hang herself. He
makesher take it off her waist and knot
it and double knot it around her throat til she can barely breathe.. The girl dante
thinks

DANTE

How nice it feels not to have this rope
so tight around my waist ! This rope by which I was hoping to hang myself.

VIRGIL

Then the guide dropped the coiled and
knotted twine to which the neck of the girl was attached; drops it into a
ravine that has no end...see how the girl swings! And the worm said to
dante--now there shall comewhat your
paranoia has sent.

DANTE

Suddenly,a creature so bizarre came climbing up upon
myhangman's rope. A giant beast with
the body of a serpent, the tail of a scorpion, the wings of an eagle and the
face of a dignified and honest old man.

The giant puppet Geryon flies across the stage. He has the
face of a politician and thebody is of
a reptilian monster. He gesticulates as if giving a stump speech, kissing
babies, proclaiming victory. He leans into the audience in an attitude of
extreme confidentiality.

THE BEAST GERYON(SPOKEN BY ONE OF HELL CHORUS)

*Behold the beast with the dagger tail

who crosses mountains, shatters weapons
and walls.

Behold the one whose stench fills the
world!

"I'll save you, dante," the
monster said, "I'll lend you a hand, save you fromstrangulation, the finaldeficit of the soul"

VIRGIL (TO DANTE)

He's our only way out. He knows the ropes.

DANTE

He wears the face of a good man. But
his body is thebody of a snake, with
its venomoustail quivering in the void.
We mounted the back of the filthy beast whose name isfraud.

Here is punished all varieties of
fraud, all forms of deliberate deceit. Here pity only lives when it's dead.

SONG OF THE CIRCLE OF LYING

Ordinary fraud: panderers and seducers;
those who live to make others love them so that they can hurt and abandon them;
dealers of dreams lenders of flattery, heart stealers. mind fuckers. Their
eternal punishment--to swim in their own shit.

DANTE

The bottom of this circle was so deep
that no matter where we stood, we could not see it. I saw a swarm of snakes and
among thempeople were running naked,
terrified, with no hope of hiding place or escape. Their hands were tied behind
their backs by snakes and snakes wrapped around their loins. As I was watching,
a serpent with six feetgripped one
soul's belly with its middle feet

and with its forefeet bound his legs,
and with its back feet squeezed his head, then sank its fangs into his cheeks.
The two heads became one, the snake head and the man's. Their bodies, just as
if they were warm wax, stuck together, merged,the serpent and the dead soul.So
thatthey were neither man nor snake but
both--man and snake in one, the Thief.

WAYS TO BE A THIEF(SPOKEN BY ONE OF HELL CHOIR)

To take what is not yours without
pretense of it ever belonging to you in the first place--simple theft.

To make what is not yours, yours, til
everybody including you believes it isyours-- complex theft.

To have everybody believing what is not
yoursalways was is and will be yours, including
the person or persons you ripped it off from--truly sophisticated theft.

To be borna girl:because everybody knows that girls steal everything including history
because they don't have one of their own--even Eve had to steal the apple which
proves that although she may be responsible for original sin, she never had an
original idea.

Someone who takes what is not hers.
Women are the perfect thieves becausehaving no world of their own, they have to appropriate everything.
Furthermore, girls are very good atfeelingguilty and since feeling
guilty must come from doing something guilty, they're probably at least thieves
if not something worse. In addition, girls are known to have a talent for doing
things in the most underhanded sneaky ways which is what makes them suit the
definition of thieves so perfectly in the first place. It is as natural to them
to lie and steal as it is for a fish to swim. A thief is half man, half snake
because those are the two creatures woman stole from to make up herself. From
man, she robbed the rib and from the snake, she stole the fruit of knowledge.
So in fact, since a woman is a thief, she cannot even be a woman. The body and
soul she has appropriated --the snake man is the only real live girl.

DANTE

I don't want to steal, but Ican't help it--I started in a bastard tongue,
a tongue ripped off from the loins of latin--that's Italian. The language of my
originmade me a thief. Virgil the worm,
the mouth, of reason, squeezed the truth of it out of me, finally.

VIRGIL

Wrapping myself around her, I rescued
her from self delusion, which is the hope thatone is better than one knows she is. We continued our crawl down the
ever descent.

DANTE

And what I saw below me still fills my heart
with misery--the final morsel of it that the worm had not yet eaten.

SUBWAY
STOP:

FRAUDULENT
COUNCILLORS

BEATRICE

*As many fireflies as the farmer sees
glimmering in the field at dusk, there where he gathers his grapes and tills
his soil, so were the innumerable flames that blazed in the eighth abyss.
Within these flames are souls. Clothed in the flames of their deceit, they are
perpetually burned by these, their own clothes.

VIRGIL

Fraud. A Webster’s definition thereof:
'to deliberately deceive; deceptionplanned and executed with intent to deprive another of his property or
rights.'

Did the hero Ulysses who has been
placed by Dante in this circle of sin, deliberately lie when he said to his men
upon his return to civilization"we
are not animals, we are not meant to live the life of ignorance but to follow
the unknown and make it knowledge. Neither love for my son, my father, or my
wife he says,could keep me
home."So he puts out to sea with a
small crew.They reach the Pillars of
Hercules, which no man had ever dared pass beyond for that was surely where the
world ended.

DANTE

"Brothers" says Ulysses,"we can't stop now.Consider who you are, where you come
from--you were made to pursue knowledge.

BEATRICE

Five timesthe moon light came and went over the empty sea,
when suddenly there appeared in the distance, the highestmountainever seen. We were glad to finally see land but all our joy soon turned
to grief for a whirlwind blew out of that new earth. Three times it spun our
craft aroundand hurled it up until the
fourth time, wefell forever to the
bottom of the sea.

DANTE

I'm not blaming anyone but myself

I'm not blaming myself

I did not believe in the end of the
world

I wasa pioneer--

A pioneer can only believe in
frontiers.

I was trying to get to the truth.

Without heroes willing to exaggerate
and lie

humanity would never even get out of
bed.

SUBWAY STOP: The ninth abyss of the eighth
circle:

The Sowers of Scandal and Schism.

THE FIGURES
PERFORM THE DANCE OF DISMEMBERMENT

VIRGIL

Herethe damned areperpetually
tearing themselves in half and after they are healed, they tear themselves
apart all again.

DANTE

He was ripped down the middle, from
chin to ass. In what agony he seemed to me; his tongue slit in his throat. Then
another soulpassed with hishands chopped off and lifting up his bloody
stumps like hooves in the black air,he
talked and choked in the blood that was flowing from his own tongue. He said to
me resignedly--"what's done is done" but I said"your talk brought death to your own
people, your own flesh and blood." Hearing this, he went away, howling
like one gone mad in the pit of his sadness. Then I sawthe torso of a human body that walked just
like a man and in its hand carried its cut off head, which the body used as
alamp to find its way in the dark. The
bodiless head spoke to me in passing, it said "because my talk divided
father from son, Imust carry my mind
cut off from its body."

FINAL SUBWAY STOP IN HELL:

THE CIRCLE OF BETRAYAL

BEATRICE

The circle of treachery--the sin of
cold bloodat the bottom of the
universe.

HELL
CHORUS

traitors to kin in cold blood

traitors to countryin cold blood

traitors to public interest for private
profitin cold blood

traitors gnawing at each other in the
frozen lakein cold
blood

until they are too frozen to be dead.

BEATRICE

Nimrod, the traitor to a common
language.

Ugolino, the traitor of statein the pit of hate, chewing eternally on a
Cardinal's head--the Cardinal who sealed up his innocent children with him in
atower so Ugolino could watch the only
pure parts of himself starve to death.

VOICE
OVER OF A WEEPING MAN
I heard the door of the tower nailed shut and I looked at my three silent sons.
I did not cry and so I turned to stone inside. When I saw hopelessness in my
children's eyes, I bit my hands in grief. Seeing this, they thought I was
hungry and begged me to eat their flesh as their reason said it was I who gave
it to them. Oh, hard hard earth, why didn't youopen up then?I saw them die, one
by one by one. Then I gave myself, now blind, to groping over their bodies and
calling them to eat as if they were alive, my mouth licking the salt off their
flesh. Then my hungerhad more power
than my grief.

DANTE

When he finished his story, he went
back to gnawing on the wretched priest's head, like a dog on his onlybone.

VIRGIL

So we've arrived atthe final ring of the final circle of hell.
The place reserved for traitors who betrayed those thatgave them sustenance, the violators of
hospitality, of generosity, the advantage takers of those who sought nothing in
return.The sight of these traitors is
sealed blind in their freezing tears. Here Lucifer chews ferociously on them.
His three bottomless mouths full of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.

THE DANCE OF THE MOUTHS OF SATAN

DANTE

Do not ask me what happened to me
here--I can't write it. All words fall short of what it was--I didn't die and
yet I was not alive.

What is it I've become, deprived of both death
and life?

THE SONG OF DEEP BETRAYAL

To deliberately make those love you who
would not love you, whom you do not love.

To deliberately make those dependent on
you who did not ask to be so.

To deliberately encourage love when you
only mean to use.

To deliberately say it is for the good
of the many when it is for the good of the few.

To deliberately and intentionally
deceive until that deception destroys.

To justify the act of betrayal until
promises mean nothing

Until you feel nothing

Until you only look like a human being

Until you are really only a dead soul
in life.

VIRGIL(WEEPING)

He had three faces--one in the middle
that was red as blood, one on the right that was as yellow as piss and one on
the left, black as night. Beneath his faces a pair of wings spanned out--they
had no feathers, but scales. They were likebats' wings and when he beat them a constant bitter wind blew.All Cocytus froze beneath this wind.

DANTE

He cried out of his six eyes and down
his three chins. The tears ran in a bleeding torrent and in each of his three
mouths he tore apart a sinner as if he were a meat grinder instead of a fiend
gnashing his teeth. I have no story for what I saw. What I saw and heard and
felt there is beyond belief.

BEATRICE

For what she witnessed here, it would be a
crime to be a ghost writer, at all.

DANTE

Neither dead nor alive...

BEATRICE

dante, the girl ghost writer, has used
up her pot of disappearing ink in the circle of betrayal. In their blood bath
she sees her face, in their tears, her words dissolve.

DANTE

The more rotten, the less avail is
meaning, she thinks with her hand over the heart that is no more. I want my
heart back.

VIRGIL

It's too late, dante. Ym--mm good to
the last drop.

DANTE

Can you grow back a heart, the ghost
girl wonders, grow it back like a starfish his limb? She wonders as she sits,
paralyzed in the pit of hell. In the belly of Satan.

BEATRICE

The image of her monk appears. In the
illumination, he's painting a story-- beautiful pigments, gorgeous shapes. He
has made a home for himself here inhell
with the expansiveness of his cramped style. The picture he is illuminating is herstory, herComedy.He's making her visible in and around the flourishes and details of a
bestiary. Now in the intricacy. He draws her picture, he makes her appear....
the homeless cowled face. The creature she created....

DANTE

I left him there, illuminating. I had seen all
I could see. I grabbed hold of the neck of my guide and we climbed down the
massive, frigid body of Satan and when we reached the place where the hip
joined the flank, we turned our bodies over. To my surprise, we were not upside
down at all for we had passed the deepestpartof this world and come
outthe other side.It was there that we emerged to see the stars
in the sky again. Shining.

END
PART I: GHOSTWRITING THE INFERNO

PURGATORY

THE ART OF
ILLUMINATION

PART
II: A GIRL'S GUIDE TO THE DIVINE COMEDY

WHEREIN THE GIRL DANTE IS NO LONGER A GHOST WRITER BUT
AMONK/MAN ILLUMINATING THE DIVINE
COMEDY, IN SPECIFIC--PURGATORY.

CHARACTERS

Dante-- a handsome monk/man who is played by/but doesn't know/remember she's the girl dante

Beatrice--a transvestite porno star

Virgil-- a vacation home real estate agent

Forms and Singers, Angel of Humility

The stage set is evocative of a giant illuminated manuscript.
Downstage, dante, dressed in monk's garb, holds the giant oriental calligraphy
brush. Virgil, now a real estate agent for resort properties, and Beatrice, a
transvestite porn star, stand at opposite sides, upstage.

DANTE(VOICE OVER)

*To course across happier waters now

my talent's little vessellifts her sails

and sings of Purgatory, that second
kingdom

in which the soul is purged of hell.

DANTE

I am in Purgatory because I got used to
Helland as soon as familiarity breeds
contempt, it disappears. Purgatory however, shares a distinct resemblance to
Hell--samecircles of sins, same
classof monsters and sinners but the
rules aredifferent --here, there's a
clause for escaping.

VIRGIL

Purgatory!

a remote island,rich andrepentant

place of purgation

place of redemption

Purgatory!

prime property

the investment chance ofa lifetime.

an opportunity bonanza for the
well-heeled soul.

BEATRICE

Purgatory is a relatively new addition
to spiritual topography, historically speaking. Until the Middle Ages, it was
just heaven and hell with nothing but life on earth in between.One of Purgatory's primary functions was to
save from Hell sinners belonging to specific social groups who were damned by
the very nature of their work-- like usurers and blood-letters. Purgatory, by
making the salvation of the money lender possible, contributed greatly to the
birth and success of capitalism.

DANTE

*The delicate hue of oriental sapphire
in which the sky was steeped, restored my joy in seeing.

I had left behind me the underworld of death.
I was on the shores of Purgatory, the island where the soul can make amends.

To
this end, I not only became spirit made flesh--Ichanged my sex.

VIRGIL

Rejoicedante! Now youhave the body of a
man.Thanks to my voice of reason, you
have given up the desire to be a girl, that is--a ghost. By this action you
havecertainly come up in the world.

BEATRICE(THETRANSVESTITEPORN STAR)

It is true: the girl dante, the ghost
writer had become a handsomeman attired
as a monk, for the modesty of his too firm flesh.

DANTE(STUTTERING AND TOYING WITH HIS
BRUSH)

This ascension business is difficult
for me to understand. While I have a desire to be seen, I am not at all sure I
wish to be seen like this.

BEATRICE

Oh dante, love of my life only I didn't
know it. If you want to be the hero of this tale, you have to be a boy because
a girl can never come back alive from the dead. If a girl comes back at all,
she's brain dead. Or she has no brain at all, only body; that is: she is
invisible. This is not the route for a would be hero; an individual who can
prove himself, who can be heard, has to be alive in this world and therefore a
guy.

DANTE

Butthe monk scribe who is dante the ex-girl is thinking what for this
struggle to get into Purgatory? A place where sins bleed into each other with
no struggle, no fixed position, no hierarchy moral or otherwise.

VIRGIL

That's democracy!

DANTE

Where souls, unlike those in hell, are
addicts ofchange, sexwise and other--
making the whole purgatorial atmosphere of perpetual improvement volatile, or
violent, or dangerous, or worse... a cosmos of fashion.

Virgil--if
I get volatile, I get violent. If I come off the shelf of my invisibility into
this world of sin and redemption, I will do murder and a multitude of other
heinous crimes that I merely write about now.

VIRGIL

Then you will become a hero! Do not be
afraid, for good or bad, every deed we do has its roots in love.

THE FIGURE OF BEATRICE LIGHTS UP, SHE IS
TAKING A BUBBLE BATH AND SINGING THE
FOLLOWING WITHCHORUS

LOVE
THAT

Love
that talks to me in my mind

Love
that creates good and bad

Love
that moves the heart to weep

Love
that moves the mind to think

Love
that makes love

Love
that makes hate

Love
that always talks to me.

CHOIR MEMBER

*Then, in the distance, there was a
heavy whoosh of wings.

Even as doves flocked together where
they feed, will suddenly leave their food and fly away if they hear something
that scares them, so the singers left their song behind, and turned away from
the sea and towards the Mountain of Purgatory, like those who must go but do
not know where.

The appearance of the Angel of Humility who crawls across
the floor in a sanitary body bag. He has the longest finger nails in the world.

DANTE

There
appeared a light that crossed the sea so fast, no flight of bird could surpass
it. From the light, a white shape.But I
did not know what it was. Then, my guiderecognized the Angel of Humility.

THE ANGEL CRAWLS OUT OF HIS WHITE BODY BAG.

VIRGIL

SSHUSH, Dante--that's the angel who holds the
keys to Purgatory. Humor him. He's a real mogul.

ANGEL

The angel who looks almost exactly like
Howard Hughs at his most emaciated, paranoiac, andreclusive, welcomes dante.

The first step was white marble, so
bright I could see my reflection there. The second step was crumbling rock,
scorched and scarred and cracked. The third step,massive, towering, was made of porphyry, as
flaming red as anyblood that spurts
from human vein.Upon it stood the angel
before the gate to Purgatory. I threwmyself at his feet, crying "Open, open to me".

ANGEL

Have to register you first.

The Angel paints a series of snake like S's that resemble
$dollar$ signs all over dante's body and on the scrim behind him. The S's shine
like ghosts or old home movies through dante's body.

VIRGIL

The S's stand for the seven deadly
sins, which, more or less, mark every human.

DANTE

I know I know. I got the scars-- Just
gimme the goddamn keys.

The keys to Purgatory are enormous. dante places one under
each of his arms. They are his crutches up the Mountain of Purgatory. At times
he must carry his brush in his teeth.

ANGEL

Now you're talking. Enter
herein--Purgatory! The place you and your loved ones can alwaysbuy your way out of sin.

VIRGIL

The spiritual perks of capitalism.

ANGEL

Sinssss...sinssss....

The angel with his calculator computes sinfulness. On the
scrim various sins and their dollar value light up and are put on sale by the
Angel of Humility. The Angel gets the cash and the sin gets erased.

dante doesn't understand this language.
Greek to me, he laughs. Greek to me. It’s confusing enough as it is having this
man's body. And going back to his calligraphy, he thinks 'it doesn't matter
what I understand, as long as I can reproduce what I see.'

VIRGIL

Then it will all come out evenly and
you can ascend spiritually.God loves
those who can balance the books at the end of the month.

ANGEL

And show a profit.

Dante brushes a series of primary colors on
the scrim, which obliterate a beautiful medieval illumination.

DANTE

Sins to be obliterated in Purgatory,
inclusive of but not limited to:

The Sins Against Humanity:

hunger, exploitation, violence, pride,
treachery....

ANGEL

Hey, dante, if you ever want to get
past the waiting room, shut your mouth and take up the golden keys.

VIRGIL

Says the emaciated angel with the
white, white teeth.

DANTE

Then there are the sins against
eternity:

equivocation of horror to horror

logic when it comes to the unthinkable

rationality when it comes to the
irrational

bureaucracy when it comes to innocence

language when it comes to starvation

the sin of hiding and all its
variations:

hiding from the poor

the hopeless

the different skinned

the different gendered

the different thinking.

Hiding from violence

hiding from love,

from helplessness,

from change.

BEATRICE

SHUT UP, LOVE. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

VIRGIL

dantefollows the illuminated manuscript concocted by the monk/scribe she has
become, the monk who hates her, body and soul. Things come out of dante's head
transformed by the scribe's ink and stylus--the scribe who doesn't like her,
who will never listen to a word she's saying--not in a million years, who knows
the exact number of lines inhis paper
and how the pigments must be crushed and how many characters shall fit upon and
what size and hue each of the letters should be and what deserves illuminating.

VIRGIL

See, dante. Purgatory is a very
upwardly mobile place, where ambition holds the golden keys. Where a worm is
not a worm, but a salesman of prime property. And the values keep going up, up,
up, and the interest rates down. It's a sellers market.

DANTE

The boulders and trees of Purgatory all
have my autograph--the D for Dante writ large and engraved with winged and gold
leafed serapherim, the H for hero illuminated with illustrations of the great
men of history. Dante is happy with his epitaph in Purgatory. He always hated
being a ghost; that is--a girl.

ILLUMINATION:
THE PRIDEFUL.

THE FIGURES SHAPEA
FLUID IMAGE OF INDIVIDUALS WITH HEAVY HONORARY MEDALS AROUND THEIR NECKS,
WEIGHING THEM DOWN.

SONG
OF PRIDE

I
can do everything

I
don't need anyone

I
will save everyone

I
will destroy the world

Follow
me

No
matter what

I
do or say

VIRGIL

The general, the president, the king,
the martyr, the teacher, the artist, the loud mouth, the fascist, the mother,
the father. Look ahead, look at me. I'm all you can see. You don't need anyone
but me--you will never have to be responsible for what you do, never to blame.
I take that responsibility. In exchange, I take you.

BEATRICE(STRIP TEASE)

*In the sky of pride,

Fame is a fickle wind

that blows now here, now there

and changes its name each time it has
changes direction.

(HE/SHE GRABS DANTE'S BRUSH AND INCORPORATES IT INTO HIS
ACT)

That man there who moves so slowly

All the world once acclaimed his name--

and now they all say 'who?'

Your fame wears the color of the grass

that the sun brings up fresh and green;

that same sun will set it withering.

THE
CIRCLE OF ENVY REPENTING

In which the envious repentant sew each other’s eyes shut
with barbed wire. dante is blindfolded just like the scales of justice. They
twirl her around and around.

VIRGIL

Question: When is looking not seeing?

BEATRICE(AS SHE SEWS CLOSED HEROWNEYES)

I know! I know!

VIRGIL
Time's UP.

BEATRICE

But....

VIRGIL(KINDLY)

Here envy is punished. Iron wires sew
up their eyes so they cannot see what their hearts really desire.

THE SONG OF THE SIN OF ENVY REDEEMED 'JUST
LOOKING'

(as sung by the blind)

Transmitted over the hammers of the
regentrification crews, through the scraping of the gardener's hoe against the
subterranean terrace stones:

Just looking, just looking--

don't want to buy anything, just
looking.

Looking out a lovely window onto a
lovely park,

as you stand safe and sound

behind the long silent glass

while minutes near there's another
world, not so pretty

poor and broken, in violence you can't
hear

except for the smooth vibrations
carried

underfoot your orientals, overhead your
security alarms

beneath the rumble of your immaculate children playing
hopscotch.

Just looking. Looking.

The greatest sin for such as us is just
looking.

We're just window shopping with our
eyes snapped shut,

shutting out the different skinned

the different gendered

the different thinking

until just looking is just hiding

hiding from violence

hiding from fear

hiding from what you can't help and
what you can.

Until just looking is inhuman.

We walk around like it's blind man's
bluff

dizzy with our companion's twirling.

We stumblearound--our armsheld stiffly out.

We would not think to disobey the rules
of play and take our blindfolds off.

The still blind folded dante is tied to a pathetic tree and
shot by TV remote controls ala firing squad. Dead, he takes his blindfold off
and takes up his calligraphy brush like a walking stick that turns into a
violent weapon.

THE CIRCLE OF RAGE

IN
WHICH SINNERS

JOURNEY THROUGH THE SMOKE AND FOG OF THEIR OWN
FURY

DANCE OF CHOKING AND BLIND RAGE

THE WORDLESS SONG OF TANTRUM AND HYSTERIA

DANTE(VOICE OVER)

Hell's blackness was never as deep as
the smoke that now encompassed me. I stumbled blindly behind my guide, grabbing
his coat, afraid of losing my way. The smokes so strong, I could neither see
nor stop crying.

VIRGIL

He wept so much that a river came of
his angered tears...a river of misery known as greed. So it was that we swam
our way upstream.

BEATRICE (LEWDLY STREWN ONBED)

*We are in the land of misers where the
river of greed begins its miserable course among the stinking pigs that are its
citizens. From its beginning to its end, virtue is treated like a poisonous
snake. Everyone runs from it as if it were the plague. Upward it flows, like a
ladder, this river and it gets bolder and wilder until all along its banks, the
dogs turn into wolves. I see your grandchild, dante--he's turned into a hunter
ofwolves. He sells their flesh while
they're still living. He takes their fur while they still need it. He comes out
bloody and laughing from the foresthe's
plundering, leaving it so ruined that in a thousandyears, it will not grow again one single
tree.

DANTEIt's supposed to be getting better
and better, kinder and gentler the higher I go. But it just seems to be getting
worse.

BEATRICE (MANICURING NAILS WITH GIANT RAZOR BLADE)

The world is deserted by virtue and
pregnant with injustice.

DANTE

But tell me the reason why so I may
know and show others the way to avoid it.

DANTE HOLDS UP THE HUGE CALLIGRAPHY BRUSH

BEATRICE

HA!

SOUL IN THE SMOKE OF ANGER

Oh Brother, the world is blind and you
come from the world...

DANTE(SCREAMING)

O.K! So far in Purgatory, the monk man
that is me is journeying, just like a hero through the desperate fog ofall his failings. He is writing down
absolutely everythinghe hears and sees.
He puts his name to everything--whether it is his or not. Ownership and
originality have nothing to do withart
orproperty, reasons dante, for without
my skills the truth would never be heard out and therefore it would not exist.
Like the girl I once was, it would be less thanuseless, that is--lacking in visibility, which is the divine measure of
all things.

THE
CIRCLE OF SLOTH:

IN WHICH THE SLOTHFUL MUST RUN AND RUN WITHOUT REST AS THEIR
PUNISHMENT. THEY SING:

THEHOSANNAOFVICTIMHOOD

I'm a victim of circumstance.

Just a poor old victim of circumstance

He's a victim

you're a victim

the state is a victim

the people are a victim

it's not my fault, it's my heritage

it's not my fault, someone else pulled
the trigger

it's not my fault, I was brought up
wrong

it's not my fault, it was the medicine
I took

it's not my fault, it’s the pollutants
in the air I breathe

it's not my fault, I didn't sign the
bill

it's not my fault, I didn't make her
homeless

its not my fault I didn't give him AIDS

its no my fault I didn't make her
insane

It's not my fault, it's not my
responsibility

I'm a victim of circumstance, just like
you

I have no accountability on earth

I have no accountability on earth.

DANTE

The scribe dante upon hearing this no
longer knows what to write on the parchment to assure hisascent. "Pardon me," he says
desperate like to virgil the mouth of reason-- "I thought the whole point
of Purgatory was learning totake
responsibility" If that is not the truth that will get me to Paradise,
please teach me what is...

VIRGIL

Mergers and buy outs, you silly.

BEATRICE

That is, the business of loving.

DANTE

I don't get it. I just went through
hell giving up love so I could get to heaven.

BEATRICE

That's right .

DANTE

And now you tell me that love is all there is.
So therefore, as it stands, I am nothing.

BEATRICE

No, Dante. You still listen with the
ears of a girl, that is: a masochist. Here in Purgatory, things are different.
The rules of redemption are different. Love is different. Here, you don't need
a heart to know love; as a matter of fact, a heart in such a matter in
Purgatory would be...a handicap.

DANTE

Then, my master,from the perspective of your vast reason,
teach me what love is so I may get itand get out of here.

Beatrice, dressed in
black leather and chains, ties dante up and beats him with the lash of love
during Virgil's Discourse on Love.

VIRGIL

Andvirgil took this opportunity to worm his way into the hole that was left
behind by the ex-girl's devoured heart and coiling there, he began to sing the
following:

There's your good love and your bad

Your happy love and your sad

one can love one's self too much and
others too little,

one may love distortedly or perversely
or out of key

but no matter what, love is absolutely
everything.

The soul responds to everything that
makes it happy. The soul when seized with longing, that is love, never rests
until it possesses its beloved thing.

No Creator and no creature who ever
was, was without love.

Love is the seed of every good and
every evil deed.

Love is absolutelyeverything. Love is the very most important
thing.

DANTE(CURLED ON THE FLOOR IN AGONYAND ECSTASY)

But I don't understand. I thought that
in the free market democracy of Purgatory all are created equal.Sins and good deeds all are equal, sinners
and saints equal, with everybody having an equal opportunity to get to heaven.
Right?

BEATRICE

Relative and equal, dear. One big happy
family.

DANTE

So, if everything and everyone is
equal, how can love, divine or otherwise, be any more important than any other
quality?

VIRGIL

dante, love is not a quality nor a
humor nor a man nor a beast. Love is the divine principle itself and therefore
without limit or definition. Subject to change and interpretation, like the
skies on an autumn night. It is the infinite variable, the reason of reason,
the jewel of chaos theory.

dante, completely beaten to a pulp by
Beatrice, begs

DANTE

Are we finished, dear teacher, please
with your discourse on love? I think I get it now.

VIRGIL

Yes, my child, to understand it any
deeper you must depend on faith.

(BEATRICE, POINTING TO HERSELF, SMILING)

VIRGIL(LASCIVIOUSLY)

And with such a faith you no longer
need me. Its time for me to leave. My son, you and I have seen the temporary
fire and the eternal fire; we have experienced together each and every sin and
its punishment. Now you havereached the
place past which my powers of reason and art cannot guide you. Your will is
your own now--whole, erect, free. I crown you sovereign all over yourself. I'm
going back home to hell. Send me a postcard when you get there. Ciao!

Beatrice, triumphant, crawls into dante's lap and takes off
his monk's robe. The emaciated Angel of Humility climbs out of nowhere and
steals the giant calligraphy pen and starts a game of tick tack toe over a list
of sins and penances.

BEATRICE

I'm going to take you to heaven, big
boy.

DANTE(GRABBING BACK HIS PEN)

The monk who is now alone with himself

BEATRICE

and his love Beatrice

DANTE

pushes his brush into the belly of the beast.
His brush dipped in the gold ink bleeds the page until it has no flesh only
black blood, no meat but the gristle of symbology. The language he makes up by
slicing open every wordthat ever was
starts to fall fast on the parchment like hail out of a broken sky. And it
reads:

SONG
OF AMERICA/PURGATORY

Oh America/Purgatory -- you island of
dreams

you ship without captain in angry seas,

youqueen of no-tell motels

you maker of mega stars, every one of
us

famous for fifteen minutes.

*Youwith your riches, peace, justice, and equality.

you with yourschemes, plans and dreams so fabulous

that whatever threads October sees you
weave

come mid November you've sent them all
unraveling.

How many times have you changed laws
and sides, offices

and customs and if yourmemory serves you right

then you will see yourself like a sick
person

who finding no rest upon hisbed, turns and tosses

but can find no place toease his pain.

DANTE

Dear god:

I know from my readings of the Good
Book, that to get your ear I better be brief. Well, this is it: I don't want to
live anymore, God in the United States of Purgatory, where everything is equal
in the eyes of the lord money, one nation under a trillion dollar debt with
liberty and justice for all in a state of violence, wherein I cannot sleep at
night for the noise of gunshots out my window. Where...I cannot live in this
shit.

Dear god--

Sendme back tohell where evil and
its results come out making sense.

(BEATRICE LICKS ALL THE S'S OFF DANTE'S
BODY)

BEATRICE

Aw--don't take things so serious. See!
Now you are sin-free!

DANTE

It was the hour of day that turns the
homesick wanderer weeping for home. My beloved guide, virgil the worm the mouth
of reason was gone. My heart was gone. My sins were gone. I had this terrible
craving to be a girl again; that is: a mutilated heart, a broken ghost.

Now
I was too clearly in the land of shadows, the personal purgatory of self in
this time and place. Betwixt and between. Cowering from the fascist taint of
adamant decision, of total ideological commitment...thathell.

Back and forth. The halfway house of the soul;
the house of good intentions; the house of maybe and I hope so; the house of I
appreciate your position; the house of both sides now. Having left the
murderous hole of right and wrong, black and white, yes or no that has led to
so much slaughter, I have found no respite in the grey lands herein. Times like
these...I want to be a girl again--someone whose thoughts and decisions in the
long run batting average of history don'tcount.These were my thoughts
inPurgatory proper where to make a
clear cut choice is to be coward.

But
then my hearing left me. My sight, as well. And I was moved to move beyond my
mind.

BEATRICE

*Now keen to search within, to look
around that dense forest, he left behind the banks and took the plain to the
wood. There he came upon a river that blockedhisadvance. The waters come up
from a pure and changeless stream--it pours and it divides. On one side, it
flows with the power to end one's memory of sin, and on the other it can restore
memory of each good deed one's ever done. One side is called Lethe, the other
Eunoe. Neither stream cures, unless the other's waters have been drunk.

And so it was that the scribe dante
went to be purified.

DANTE

I know nothing. But my heart, which is
devoured, which no longer exists, still hurts.

BEATRICE

No it doesn't, dante. It’s just your
imagination, this imaginary heart. Like when a soldier in war has his leg blown
off, for years after he still feels like the limb exists. But it doesn't.

DANTELED BY BEATRICE. AT THE RIVERS THAT LEAD TO EARTHLYPARADISE

BEATRICE(BACK IN THE BATH TUB DRINKING BOURBON)

dante
followed the shaky blue line that is the River Lethe, the waters of forgetting,
the road to man's salvation.

He
wants to jump in and forget everything bad thing he's ever done, anybody else
has ever done, anything bad that has ever happened on earth below or inthe heavens above. But...he can't do it, no
he just can't make the leap of imagination.

To
the right he sees Eunoe, the river ofselective remembering, in whose watersyou can only recallthe goodyou've done and none of the nasty-- a kind of
a fluoride system for the soul. Rivers of forgetfulness and remembering--he
knows he can't wash in one without stepping in the other--that would be like
soaping up without the rinse cycle. He doesn't want to get wet at all, poor
guy.

Virgil
has left him, the monk he was has left him, the constellations in the sky have
left him, an eclipse of the soul has hunkered down like smoke stack smoke over
his self absorption where no one can make him out. He figures to guide himself
now, poor deserted one, by the sound of those rivers--the one senility, the
other exaggeration-- the double laned highway to heaven.

Holding
himself to the river banks with his teeth, those wardens of his vulgar tongue,
he listens out, a foghorn of himself, with the salt andworms andmica of his life bursting out of his skin.

Blind
again, washed up like sea bones, again without voice, he goes with only tongue
and tears to find his way out of what he's become--the absence of memory, the
travesty of true love. He's soaked in tears, tears define his body and burnish
the mute tongue that licks the earth like a blind man’s walking stick, tasting
out the route that will take him where he's going, trying to get out from,
trying to rise up from, to shuffle his way to Paradise, drinking up the one
side then drinking down the other.

This
is how people survive their lives.

THE ILLUMINATION OF EARTHLY PARADISE:

An Electronic Book with computer images and computer
generated sound. Virtual Reality. The modern equivalent to the Cathedral
stained glass window; teaching book.

A Book of Hours for an Earthly Paradise

A MANKNEELING,HIS HEAD BENT IN PRAYER

A WOMAN BENT OVER HER TAX RETURNS

A MAN DRESSED AS A COWBOY SMOKING A
MARLBORO

A KNIGHT SLAYING A DRAGON

A SCRIBE AT HIS COPY DESK

A WORD PROCESSOR OVER HIS MONITOR

A STAINED GLASS WINDOW WITH
INDECIPHERABLE SCENES

A SELECTION OF ROCK VIDEO CUTS FROM MTV

A VIRGIN TAMING A UNICORN, HER HAND
OUTSTRETCHED IN HIS MOUTH

MARILYN MONROE

THE ANGELS ON HIGH FLYING

A 50 FOOT BOAT WITH SAILS LIKE WINGS

BREUGAL'S PAINTINGS OF BEGGARS

A GANG OF YOUNG IN RAGE ON A CITY
STREET

A STREET SO TERRIFYING THAT NO ONE
WALKS IT

A BLEEDING HEART

A MOUTH IN SCREAMS

THE SCALES OF JUSTICE

THE EQUATION FOR THE SPEED OF LIGHT

A BESTIARY

A SUPERMARKET

A CAR WASH

A BAPTISM

HANDS

DANTE (ALONE, SOUND OF SEA., NIGHT. HE HOLDS A BUTCHER'S KNIFE)

Twist the ragged filaments of blown
fluorescent tubes and make a seat for yourself in the crushed place where junk
has an everlasting peace--a divinity really. Over and over the questions, the
same ones a child asks:

what is good what is bad?

Bad must be what's ignored or laughed
away or cowered from or beat out of.

Good?good?An action that's praised or
rewarded?By whom?For what?

The small questions a child asks.

Who can say lust is bad when you may
never have anyone in your life to love? Who can say avarice and greed are bad
when you may grow old and have no money in a country that does not care for its
old?

Instead of digging at the core of-----

dig at your own hands, your own scalp,
your ear canals

dig in places that will never betray
you. dear god, this is my prayer:

dante chops off her hands.

The heavens are turned upside down
--there's more light in the dirt than in the sky. He is looking for the sky
everywhere he turns, he's thrown the brush and stylus into the river, he's
chopped off his offending hands. The stubs that are left are like the suicide
trees--that is all that's left of his memory. She's happy.

END: PURGATORY/THE ART OF ILLUMINATION

* denotes passage from The Divine
Comedy by Dante Alighieri

PARADISE

THE
GIRL OF MAPS

PART
III:A GIRL'S GUIDE TO THE DIVINE
COMEDY

CHARACTERS

The Map Girl--dante, now a young girl,
pre-adolescent, destined to chart the heart
andsoul ofthe universe

The Voices of Beatrice and Virgil

VIRGIL(V. O.)

*As upon smooth and transparent glass,
or through clear and tranquil waters, yet not so deep that the bottom is lost,
the outlines of our faces come back to us.

DANTE THEMAP GIRL

The constellations are all deranged
here. No hunters, no victorious lions,

just the saturated creatures--the shark,
the sea horse, the coral colony.

The landscape divides like a red sea
and I fellthrough its eye .

BEATRICE

The Paradise of her fumigated memory
opens up and takes her in like a freezing kitten at the door stoop. All the
sinsthat ever were of her have been
cleaned out just by the accounting for--the slate wiped clean by the soul's
self audit.

A list of the deeds of her good appear
on the platter of her flapping tongue:

--the old ladyshe escorted across the street

--the alms she gave for the poor

--the hand me down words she gave away
for the wearing.

Everything she ever worked for in her
whole life disappears into the new .....

On the scrim, the Map Girl is charting the
Universe--constellations, planets, moons, the earth's topography as seen from
space. The images keep changing from line drawings to geological surveys to
astrology charts to diagrams of the human body, the brain, the cell, the atom.
Every imaginable sort of mapping is taking place on the scrim before her eyes
and yet, it is also as if she is controlling the kaleidoscope of imagery. The
action is the juncture between the tale the Map Girl tells and the imagery on
the scrim. The title 'Paradise: the Map Girl' appears briefly on the scrim. In
front of her, she is creating, throughout the piece, a miniature paradise made
of various found objects--like a religious shrine off a highway--pictures,
pretty paper, beer bottles, canning jars, hubcaps, spark plugs, cigarette
packs. She has no hands, only stumps.

BEATRICE(VOICE OVER)

Because
the words were lost and the images disappeared, it was given toa ghost writer, to make them appear again.

She
mapped the world before the world knew its size

with the palm of her hand stretched out
to the night sky she figured out the shape of things.

MAP GIRL/DANTE

She blamed it on the room she was given
as a child.

A glass room with a glass roof, high
up, so that the air was really her earth and the ground below seemed as distant
as the sky.

THE SCRIM PORTRAYS CANTO VI OF THE PARADISO:
*QUESTIONS SPRING UP LIKE FRESH SHOOTS
AT THE FOOT OF TRUTH. THIS IS THE NATURE THAT SPURS US TO THESUMMIT, PUSHES US ON, FROM HEIGHT TO HEIGHT.

MAP GIRL

She
walked the sky with her hands, but only at night, when she could be guided by
the hunters and the lions, the fish and the half horsemen that traversed it.

And
during the days, when the sun blinded her from the signposts of travel, she
drew what she had seen in the night and the measurements she made, made the
earth clearer and bigger.

All
over the glass windows and glassfloor,
shelaid out rows and rows of the finest
onion skin and on it, she traced the longitudes and latitudes of a hypothetical
world, much larger than the one that was known.

Not
one hemisphere, but two, not two continents but seven,and in the places of the unknown,the girl demarcatedroads.She found a place for the monsters, the new world she called it and so
the size of the world doubled, secretly in the girl's glass room. Now, when the
sun hit the room all the colored places on the map lit up like a stained glass
illumination. And the girl learned not to fear the far away earth because it
was stretched out like a sleeping kitten on her floor.

No
one knew of this gift of the girl's for many, many years.And those that did, did not believe in it.

She couldn't remember anything about
her real family except the dark smell of closets. She was six when she was
taken, but the difference in the life before and the one since was so
extraordinary that it was if that first child died and a new one lived.

Her new parentsgave her everything a child could dream.

A shepherd dog and a pony.

A golden top and a silverball

An endless room with a balcony

where she could watch the heavens and
the sea.

A chamber of exquisite clothing

A chamber of illuminated books.

A chamber of the most delectable
treats.

"Read these", said the man

"Wear these", said the woman

"play with these " they said
to her, pointing to the beasts.

MAP GIRL

With these words, they left her alone
in her roomfor the years until she
turned sixteen. She wore the clothes and read the books, ate the food, played
with the beasts.Every night and day,
watching out her window, she watched the world change. And she grew to be both
wise and beautiful.

SCRIM
OVERLAY ON THE CARTOGRAPHY READS:

(FROM
THESIXTEENTH CANTO)

*You who are mother and father,

Who are all love and
all family to me.

You give me courage to speak

You so lift me up that I am more than I.

MAP GIRL

She had one vanity, though and that was
her hands. She wouldhold them up to the
lightand the light would travel through
them. She could see their blood and bones and veins becausethey weretranslucent. She would stare at these hands for hours on end as if they
were beautiful strangers and she did not belong to them. So the seasons passed
until she was sixteen.

When
her parents returned in her sixteenth year, they had a birthdayparty for the girl.All the important people of the land were
there. The girl was, for the first time in her life, introduced to people,
which was very strange for her as her life had been limited to the glass room,
the clothes, the beasts, the books, the food, and the window.

She didn't knowwhat to do or what to say to them as they
looked her over, inch by inch. They extended their hands to her but she didn't
understand the sign of welcome. In her confusion she lifted up her hands, too--
not to them butto the firelight. The
light shone through her hands and everyone could see all her veins and bones
and arteries. The people gasped in wonder,but what surprised them the mostwas that as she held her hands up, a gigantic map of the world was
illuminated through them like the sun striking stained glasswindow panes.There were the seaways and the highways andthe landmarks of the nations of the world and
the demarcations of all their boundaries. But there were also whole countries
and continents, rivers and seas that the peoplehad never seen before. It was as if the room, itself, held its breath.
And then:

'How
do you know such things,' they jabbered at the girl.

'I,
sir, ' she trembled, 'I know nothing'.

She put her hands down and the map
vanished.

After
the birthday feast, they all said goodbye and the girl went to sleep. When she
woke up, she was not in her own room at all but another glass room and the door
was locked and her beasts were gone and her beautiful clothes were gone and her
parents were no where to be found, only guards like toy soldiers who brought
her meals and cleaned her things.She
tried to make friends with this, her new family. Finally they told her she was
a prisonerbecause toknowthe whereabouts ofthe world is
always a state secret.She must be good,
said the old men who came to her windowfrom time to time to check her progress. She must be good which they
explained meant to draw for them everything shesaw that could chart the world.In return,they promised to feed
her and protect her from all evil, of which, they assured her, there was much
on heaven and earth.They gave her a
large round room, all of glass, the walls, the roof, even the floor, was
glass.They gave hersheets and sheets of charting paper, a
sextant, all of gold, a jeweled compass, and two enormous blank globes on which
to record her knowledge. They prayed over her the last rites of burial to
signify that she was dead to the world--the world she was to chart for them
without ever being allowed to walk out into it again..But in one thing, the girl kept her secret. The ones who
locked her up, who gave her themeasuring instruments, didn't understand that she measured the world
through the journeys of her hands.They
thought she did it by some brand ofintuitionthat they soughtthento quantify, when actually it was quite a science by which the
appendages traveled away from her body at night and returned to her by
day.

At
night when the guards thought she was sleeping, her hands would leave her and
they would fly.They went to Africa and
wandered its desertsandits jungles. They went to the River Ganges
and bathed, they went to the holy cityJerusalem and prayed.By intimate
touch, they knew all the wonders of the Ancient and Modern and Future Worlds.

When
her hands returned to her each dawn, she held them up to the rising day and she
extracted from their shiningveinsthe web of her journey. Quickly,she would transfer the impression to the
transparent vellum sheets that covered the windows, walls,and floor. She would take from the hands only
that information which would help the old men get where they wanted to be
going--the mountain passes, the rivers, the deserts, and plains.She ignoredthe other knowledge of the hands--themaps ofthe tastes of a thousand
exotic places,the cartography ofthe future and the buried past,the globes of galaxiesbuilt up from words like sweet, and free, and
hurt, and love; that is the cartography of feeling. She did what she was told
and ignored the multitude of maps the hands were bringing forthelines of latitude and longitude.

When
at noontime,theguards appeared, she would point wordlessly
to the new charted sheets, which they would then take away, replacing them with
four fresh blank ones.

She
wondered what would happen to her after she completed mapping the world and she
was sure it would end, as she was certain that the world had its limits.But how limited, she pondered, or how huge?As she starts to worry--because she knows
when her job's over they will kill her to keep her secrets,to seal all the portals of this knowledge,
she begins to yearn to chart the other information the hands bring her--the
images, the feelings, the lost histories, the fantasies.

For
the first time, she charts fantasy--trees taller than the sky, giants with
tusks, fish with wings and serpents with such powerful tails they sweep aside
whole cities. And she maps out feeling--the routes of love and hate, anger and
compassion. But she tears these documents up as soon as she makes them.

She
becomes fascinatedwith mapping cities,
present and past,real and
imaginary.For she has only lived threeplaces in her life, the closet of her
infancy,the square box in the forest of
her childhood and now in the mapmaker's tower and all these times, desolate of
people.

The
images of cities the hands brought back awed her.The roofs clamoring over each other like a
stack of almanacs, the faces of the houses set staring at each other in
attitudes of compare across the narrow winding streets.The things she could see in the large plate
glass windows--cakes and loaves in one, a shower of fine dresses in another,
sparkling jewels in yet another.Then
she observed the people streaming in and out of brick houses, announced by a
ringing set of chimes on each door.Through the moving pictures engraved on her tiny hands, she could almost
see their desire and sometimes their despair as they hurried through the honey
comb of their city--each as isolated as she, but somehow connected to one
another in a way she felt she lacked--as if they were one entity, at least when
they bustled through the streets or as they extended arms and goods in their
shopping.These new maps she doesn't
destroy, but conceals.

As
her hands continued to travel and bring back vast stores of information about
the roads andthe sea, the landmarks of
earth sky and water, she searched them hungrily for only one thing--the image
of the city because it was the one thing that destroyed her own lonely exile.
She sent the hands far and wide to discover these places of many people and
fantastical buildings. Thus, the discovery of the world proceeded at an
unexpected pace.

Once
she had became a connoisseur of cities, north, south east and west, the Girl of
Maps constructed a model in her mind of a city made up of the best attributes
of each,which she believed she would
like best to live in.And during the day
as she automatically trudged through the graphing of the maps, she lived in her
heart in city after city in many great houses, with a great many friends.

SCRIM: From Canto XVII: *DOWN IN THE WORLD SO ENDLESSLY BITTER
AND UP ON THE MOUNTAIN FROM WHOSE SUMMIT I WAS LIFTED AND ABOVE, DRIFTING
THROUGH THE HEAVENS FROM LIGHT TO LIGHT, I HAVE LEARNED SO MUCH THAT WILL ANGER
SO MANY MEN OF MY TIME. BUT IF I AM A TIMID FRIEND TO TRUTH, I WILL LOSE MY
LIFE THERE, AMONG THOSE WHO ONLY CALL THIS TIME A DEAD AND GONE ONE.

As
her knowledge piled up and up, it threatened to burst the seams of her tower.
So they built her another one--bigger with a great telescope through which she
could see the planet and stars. She had a great sadness inside this new house
for she could sense by the look and feel of her hands as they returned each day
that they had mapped practically the entire world.And when the job was done, she knew she would
be murdered.

When
she had been younger, before the hands had brought her the visions of the
cities, she hadnotbeen so afraid of death, because she
believedthatwhen one is dead, one is still simply alone
with one's self, and she was quite used to that.But now, she grew lonelyfor these populated places that came to her
in the moving images each morning.And
she made up her mind to expand the information of her hands that went into the
maps for the old men so she could remain in life a little longer. This was how
she made her workgo slower:

The
hands hold the girl's image forever--the image of the young girl pressed
against the night glass--her arm out making charts.She no longer charts the outlines, she maps
the things of the heart , the soul, and the hope of the globe. No longer does
she keep them secret.

'We
don't wantthese things," they tell
her,' they make it hard to see the roads. We don't want the things unless they
are made from silver or gold. You're not concentrating!"the old men say.

She
tries and tries. But she doesn't want to die.

CENTURIES
LATERAND EARLIER

It was in Ravenna thatDantesawthe hands for the first
time.They were lying outside the
cathedral.He was old and sleepless and
he liked to walk around the churchat
night, thinking. He thought the handsmust have fallen off one of the statues of thesaints.And so he took them to his hotel room for safe keeping until he could
return them to the priests.

Holding
the hands in one hand, he opens the door to his room with the other.He places them on the little table under the
reading lamp.He puts one palm up, the
other down. He marvels at their definition--the veins, the nails and their half
moons, the lines andthe wrinkles, the
soft round pads under the joints of each finger,the articulation of these joints, the
distinctive posture of each ofthe
hands, definitely a pair but highly individual untothemselves.

He
cannot at first ascertain the material of their making.They have a marble quality,but they seem too soft, too flesh to be
really stone. He stares at them.He has
to pick them up.He has to kiss
them.It is the most beautiful kiss he
has ever experienced.

He
turns off the light.He lies down on his
poor bed. He sleeps

very deeply, hard breathing as if he
were trudging up a steep cliff--the hands are in front of him, dancing, they
lead him

down
the muddy terraces of this cliff, down to the sea. With their palms stretched
out, they make two little boats, like slippers for his feet and he enters the
water on this craft. The hands take him everywhere on earth and in heaven that
they had once taken the Girl of Maps.

Night
after night, he dreams the girl and her hands. They relateher discoveries, which have vanished from
earth--the geography of love, the topography of trust, the many byways of
desire and despair and the tangle of routes to divinity.

Awake,
in her hands, the old man sees the fear in the young girl's eye as they throw
in her food and slam the metal door on the glass room she cannot leave. He sees
her there, centuries ago or ahead, he cannot be sure which-- livingas flesh, a picture in her own hands. He sees
them strangling her and the shock on her face when they tell her it is not for
finishing her map of the world that she must die, but for mappingfar too much, cities that were too grand,
emotions that were too strong, seas that were too deep, galaxies that were too
far, ideals that were too ideal. TheGirl of Maps is laughing. All along she thoughtthat her life would be put to an end when her
work was at an end, but instead they were ending her life for charting a world
without end. When the mantries to
rescue her from her room, the hands he sees her in become opaque. She vanishes
inside, where they have already finished her off.

The
old man begins to weep for the dead girl.Meanwhile in his dreams, her hands continue to carry him all over the
world, tugging him by his hands, floating him on his feet, as they sit folded
and pretty on his little desk on a sheet of blank paper.They see the whole world-- the old man's
dreams and the dead girl's hands--the actual things, and then the outlines of
the things. Then they begin to see exactlywhat the girl was charting when they murdered her--he sawshe had been mapping the inside of being--the
soul of the earth; the monsters and angels of our breathing; the atomic
particles of our hunger.And if we had
her map, thought the old man,our world
would have a different shape; it would have a different size and many, many
other dimensions than what we have now.

In
her hands, he saw a living worm crawl out and the worm said" the world is defined by the makers of
its maps and limited bythose who
control their vision.' And then the serpent crawled back inside.

If
she had just stopped mapping the world, thought the old man, perhaps they
would've made her a heroinstead of a
disappeared, or maybe they just would have let her go, anonymous.

No.Either way she's a ghost.

They
stole what they wanted of what she made and said it wasn't hers, which was easy
because, who would believe it from the hands of agirl.They gave her mapto posterity in
the form of king's glory andexplorers'
discoveries. But it really was she who had mapped the world we use today. And
much more of our world that has been lost to us.

These
are the things he learns at night when he holds up the hands to the lamplight
in his little hotel room. The hands that reveal a map of the soul."Here is love"they say, "the heart of any map".

"These
are not concepts" the girl trapped in the hands says to Dante."These are real places, visceral spaces
like Detroit or Washington.You have to
experience them like that or you won't get anywhere."The obscura offleshcovers her upand she's gone.

The old mansitting in his dark room outside a cathedral in Ravenna takes upthe dead girl's hands and transcribes what
they see for all those without love or home or life--a divine comedy for a
homeless humanity.

Meanwhile-she's
dead . When she is dead, the only thing that matters to her poor ghost body is
vision.Because when you cannot see, how
is it you can map anything?By now mapping
is everything to her, more than life itself it has become.She has a job to do in the underworld that is
her paradise-- charting the land of the dead.But to mapthe land here, one
must also count it’s disappeared, those who are not acknowledged as having ever
been dead or living.

SCRIM INSCRIPTION:

YOU WHO ONLY WRITE TO ERASE

MAP GIRL

because they are the land here-- one
big charnel house of nebulous bone and dirt and decayed flesh--the individual
aspects of which cannotbe
distinguished.So The Girl of Maps moves
the memory of her hands that have been lost to her in her own death, over the
underworld to measure its tongue and unloose its speech.After we die, she thinks, in her first night
in death from where she can see....

SCRIM INSCRIPTION:

JUST AS A MOUNTAIN IS REFLECTED IN THE LAKE AT ITS BASE

SO I SAW MIRRORED ALL OF US WHO HAVE EVER RETURNED HOME
FROMBELOW AND ABOVE.

VOICE
OF BEATRICE

The blood red towers of Dis and the
marketplace of Purgatory,and the
Paradise of Maps, which have no earthly substance.

MAP GIRL

After we die, our job, like that of
Atlas, isto hold up the living.

MAP GIRL (VOICE OVER AND LIVE)

*I think I saw the universal form

I think I saw a light stronger than the
sun

and it was running in circles.

one circle reflected the next and the
third was a ball of fire.

How incomplete are words for this...

I was like a mathematician trying to
square a circle

who cannot find the principle he needs.

I wanted to see the way in which
humankind fit in this circle of light on light,

but no matter how I struggled, my senses were
too weak.

Suddenly my mind was struck by a light

And I disappeared into the flame of
that light.

Here my imagination fails me, or
perhaps there are neither thoughts nor words for what I saw. But I have been
sent turning and turning, like a perfect wheel, by the love that turns the sun
and all the other stars in the universe. Here on Earth. As it could be.